The Woman
by writerfan2013
Summary: Irene is free and enjoying the luxuries of London's newest five star hotel. But her thoughts of ... the woman... disrupt her evening. Meanwhile the woman reflects on Sherlock and he on her. Now: Ch5 - Lipstick and tissues. The letter Joan cannot write. (Read after Ch8 of Declarations for the other side of this story.)
1. Champagne

I sip the champagne which is forbidden to him and reflect on my regained freedom.

The Shard is pleasant, in a sub-Dubai sort of way. It still overlooks London, a major flaw. Give me turquoise oceans and beaches poured like cream around their edges. Give me sunlight and give me staff.

This place manages one from that list, and those are so resentful as to make a mockery of their role. I demand grateful servitude, in all things, of all people. I have sent the general manager away to find me better staff. He took my thousand pounds and went to fulfill my wish, my every wish, any wish I might, and will, invent.

I have money, and time, and inclination. The world is mine to claim. I only wait for the moment to begin.

I have been here twenty hours and am yet to launch my scheme. I need rest, of course. I have been imprisoned in a grim American gaol and my skin alone will take weeks to recover. My mind, I have occupied whilst shut away. My body I have tended as best I could, given the limited facilities. Women are as tiresome as men.

I will rest another day. It will help solidify my idea before I begin. It must not have any weaknesses - it has none, I am certain - but another twenty fours hours' contemplation will cost me nothing - quite literally as I have no intention of honouring the hotel bill - and will insure me against -

Interference.

I have been unlucky once before. Now I will control my fortunes.

He will not have another chance.

He is far away, enmeshed in his mediocre puzzles, allowing his brain to continue the rot which began with the drugs, allowing himself to fall to waste. He keeps unworthy company. That woman, sour and monosyllabic, dogging his steps like some leaden groupie.

He thinks he values her. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Perhaps he believes he sees in her some potential, some shadow of me. His partner, he says. Another contradiction. It suggests she is his equal. That cannot be.

-Of course he has fallen very low. I saw it. America. Drugs. Helping the local police with the crumbs of cases they dole out to him. Living off his father's charity. Low indeed from the high place he and I could have held together. But he was not worthy of me. I saw it in time. I do not think of him as my equal, now. He is too degraded.

He failed himself. Failed me. I can bear the disappointment. Personally it means little. Professionally I am aware that it is a regret. He could have been useful to me. But he is not the man I imagined. He is a fool. He loved me, or, the persona I fooled him into accepting. A double fool. He exists beneath me, on the distant ground, down there with the grey Thames, laden with petty craft, small ideas. He is worthy of her, then.

She must be very good in bed for him to tolerate her.

Impossible thought. He would never lower himself.

-He is weak. And that _bitch_ might make a virtue of mere availability. Men are only men after all.

_No_.

-The new staff will have to sweep up that champagne flute. It will never hold liquid again. And the doorframe is chipped. I might move rooms; this one is spoiled.

I will start my scheme tomorrow. He is irrelevant. He can never catch me and he will break his heart all over again, trying. Excellent.

He did not catch me last time.

She did. _The woman_.

Unthinkable. It was him. He gave her the credit out of ... pity. She hangs on him, as well she might. That blank face! Her lack of expression surely denotes a lack of some vital spark in her brain. A chemical deficit. Yes.

There is something wrong with her, that she trails him so tirelessly. Plenty wrong with him, that he allows it. His weak nature, again. It keeps him in my wake.

The bottle is empty and I have not even selected a companion, a pastime, for this evening. I will summon one now. I saw him earlier. Young. Willing. High forehead. And he had those hazel eyes I prefer. He is the height I favour, too. No doubt he has more tattoos than those I glimpsed as he checked me into the hotel. I will discover them.

He can bring me more champagne.


	2. Moil

She has had ample opportunity to observe him. Their long nights together. The days spent exploring the public and the secret parts of this amazing city. He has shown her things she never knew, and she has lived here all her life. Some days she cannot take her eyes off him. If she blinks, she might miss a clue. And he has impressed upon her, repeatedly, the supremacy of the clue.

He is remarkable in repose. Sleeping, draped on the couch with one arm flung wide as if to scoop up dreams, he is abandoned, his mind relinquishing control of its container and flying free in realms it has created. Sometimes she pauses, watching, for long moments, hesitating to disturb him, relishing the chance to see him at peace.

But in motion he holds, for her, his true fascination. In motion he is ... essential, the truest portrait of himself, of the man she has become so attached to that life without him at her side is unimaginable.

In motion he reveals clues about his inner life, the things he tries to hide, or perhaps, the things he wishes he could show her but does not know how.

He has a peculiar tic. He speaks: words emerge, clipped stabs of sound, and then the speech ends but his mouth continues to move. A little motion, some excess energy, as if he has more to say than he allows himself. His brain warns him from those extra words, but his body, freed to move by the act of speech, cannot cease as readily as he wishes and betrays the tumult of ideas he clasps to his core.

When a glassmaker blows glass, the action is as smooth and fluid as the molten substance he works, yet at the end, a nub is left over, the result of the cessation of blowing. This nub is called a moil. That is what Sherlock shows at the ends of his sentences, a moil, the tiny parts he snaps off, discards, withholds from the conversation.

Can those parts be collected, thrust back into the furnace of his mind, drawn out again into a more beautiful shape than these soundless tells?

She is being sentimental, and he despises that as purposeless. Yet he is impossible to resist. Even that woman was felled by his quickness, his strength, his shy charm. That he keeps so much of himself hidden now is, Joan is certain, the fault of that woman's social antipathy, her incapacity for selflessness.

The woman did love him. Joan saw it with a clarity she generally only experiences when Sherlock is nearby. It was as clear as glass. But that love was brittle, too, and liable to crack under the strain of, for example, a perceived rival. Joan would not deny or confirm the suspicion, and the woman's reaction was proof - jealous rage.

Love presents differently in each person. Some people declare. Some people remain steadfast and true, caring without thought of return, and never speak of it. Some people resist love and succumb against their so called better judgement until some provocation, perhaps in a restaurant, leads them to reveal it.

And some people are so full of love that it leaks out despite their efforts to hold it inside. They wish they could stop feeling but they cannot. They stifle emotion, attempt pure logic, pure deduction, but after that perfect utterance is created, and concentration is relaxed, a tiny moil remains, the sign of things never meant to be spoken, a precious remnant, the evidence of love.


	3. Opaque

This woman. It is a puzzle still. How can I have been so thoroughly deceived? Not simply in my conviction of having seen her true self, the first time I saw her - how wrong I was, and how shallow and thin was my first impression, based only on her beauty and my despite of the role she had adopted when our paths met - but in my feelings for her. There, I was most completely fooled.

I had thought myself incapable of love. Had imagined that I put away all such sentiment when I admitted that the best, the youthful, the healthiest part of my life is gone. I planned an existence without affection. My mind was to be pure and clean although my body was not. No pollution of amour would find its way past logic and fact.

The sight of her was a shock. I expected someone mean and two-dimensional. But even as I stood surprised, my first instinct to mock, I could see that she had intelligence, a spark in her eyes, and I wondered how she could have stooped to this forgery of a life.

Perhaps it was her beauty which led me to continue our association, and even, to become close. I am male, after all. It is hard to resist the charms of the female form and indeed, in most cases there is no reason to.

But then, as we grew together, I learned her secrets - all of them, I believed. I understood her, and was prepared to accept, if not to acknowledge, that she understood me. We were a partnership long before such a thing was formally suggested. I saw it coming, and my own proposal was ready.

Then I saw a moment, my opportunity for vengeance against all the wrongs of my past. I knew the price I would pay and was glad to pay it, even eager. I knew that my action would separate me from her forever but this deed would be my choice. I showed her vengefulness and chill cruelty, and awaited abandonment. I anticipated coldness, expected rejection and horror.

But she shocked me. Threw me out of my complacent assumptions. She stopped my heart with how completely I had been deceived. She was no burden, no forgery, no facsimile friend. In my worst moment, she showed me only gentle pity, and offered a calming hand. I was astounded. This woman I thought I could predict! I knew no way to accept her kindness except through repetition of her earlier words. She humbled me as the rest of her kind could not.

And when that other woman returned, not dead - better dead, best in memory, best stilled by death and not pressing this knife to my core - Watson remained steadfast beside me and at the end, helped me see the extent to which my life in London was a lie, and how I wasted my love and my health on that falsehood.

Irene, thrusting into my new life like a jagged blade, unpeeled my careful layers. She skinned me, undid me with the damage done by her supposed kidnap, and then flayed me again with the discovery of her lies. I found her out, was repelled, but still her reticence, her refusal to end me, I could not understand. Watson did that. She is remarkable.

And Watson remains opaque to me. How can this be? We share this house and everything in it is as much hers as mine. I can observe her day and night, awake and asleep, but still she startles me - a word or a look, and I have to reassess her. Fascinating. And her work is valuable, her insights quite different to my own. She is my friend, precious to me in that, and she is amazing, the only person I consider my equal. When we are together, engaged in the work, we are at our best, and I imagine our partnership continuing, as I regrow the layers I have lost, and she stays steady and unwavering, yet still, for the present, mysterious in her motives, at my side.


	4. Amateur

I have infinite creativity. I have infinite motivation. And although opportunities may be limited, I do not intend that fact to so much as give me pause. I made him a promise. I will keep that promise.

He promised me too, many things, but I forgive him his betrayals. The person to whom he made those impassioned declarations was a figment, a few sketchy charcoal marks on a much-used canvas, intended for a temporary illusion. I was obliged to continue, after I uncovered his ... interesting mind... and I confess I was amazed to find that despite my incomplete portrayal, he filled in all my blanks for himself. For a while, I was, in his mind, the perfect woman – the only woman. And who does not wish to be perfection, in her lover's eyes?

I forgive him for turning his back on Irene. But – now – shining his light on that woman, this is harder to swallow. She has not the capacity to appreciate him in any but the basest sense. The waste shocks me.

I am angered by his rejection of Moriarty. A personal anger. My research told me to expect this. My knowledge of him, however, led me to believe that my resurrection would effect a softening of his attitude towards my so called crimes.

When it did not, I made him a promise: to hurt him.

He practically begged me to kill him but I will not allow him anything so finite, so limited. Death ends suffering, and he needs to suffer in order to regain an appreciation of me. When I have tortured him out of his foolhardy attachment to that woman, I will offer, again, to rescue him.

The mark of the warrior: grace in victory.

I have waited only to be sure that he would not take the coward's escape again – the quick drop onto the street and into a syringe. But months have passed and my spies tell me there is no indication of a relapse. And so it is time.

My plan is crude. It need be nothing else. It will gain me money, which assists with power, and it will put an end to the woman.

I need not dirty my own hands with any part of it. Others are standing by to execute my designs. I could remain aloof in my glass tower and await the rewards which will fall into my lap, into my bed.

But today I saw her kiss him, a nothing, an amateur kiss from a person who is unaccustomed to extracting the required response from the recipient. The kiss was of no consequence. Except – I also saw, where the woman did not, his expression as her lips brushed his skin. His look was – tender. Protective. I saw – though it disgusts me to admit it – pride, a kind of revolting possessiveness from him to her, as if he had somehow created his own admirer.

And so I will be taking part in this little game I have prepared, with a relish I have rarely experienced. It enlivens me, sharpens my mind, brings a keen hunger for the kill.

It is time for that woman to stop.

**Author's note:** read this after Declarations 5 if you like, as the two stories feed into one other. -Sef


	5. Lipstick and tissues

She thinks of him as the man steps out from the cubicle in the Ladies restroom. She thinks of him as she grabs, not pepper spray - she has none, in her London purse - but her perfume, and sprays repeatedly at the eyes of her attacker.

She thinks of him as the man gets his hand over her mouth to kill her scream, and the bottle of Guerlain smashes on the floor. She tries to wriggle so that her attacker falls into the glass, or slips on the spilled fragrance, but she is already being bundled through the kitchen.

"Illegal immigrant," growls her captor to the pale young men at the stoves and sinks. Joan appeals to the staff with her eyes but the implication that UK Immigration is here turns everyone to stone. Joan cannot speak, cannot yell, _I am an American citizen, I am on vacation, I am a detective_. Her words have been cut off and there are only her thoughts

The man is joined round the back of the cafe by another man, who helps him get Joan into the back of a van. Ford Transit, white, neither clean nor dirty, three year old license plate. Absolutely unremarkable.

Joan is tied one-handed to a hook in the plywood wall of the van. "Hang on if you can," says the van driver nastily. There is nothing to hang on to. Joan will be thrown around in here, tethered as she is by one wrist. She is free to speak now but nothing comes.

If Sherlock was here he would have noticed her unusually long absence. Sherlock's cousin, sitting in the cafe enjoying what he imagines is a friendly cup of coffee with Joan, is good but he is not tuned in to her, does not know that she is not the kind of woman who spends fifteen minutes in the bathroom adjusting hair and make-up or chatting with other females she might encounter.

The van roars away with Joan's captors in the front. She is alone for the moment and she tries to notice things but it is impossible with the van lurching around corners (how many? She has already lost count) and the stress of having been kidnapped.

It is obviously Moriarty behind the kidnap. And it is almost obvious that Joan will be the bait to lure Sherlock to Moriarty. This is what she suggested to Sherlock's cousin, hoping he could help her deflect the attack. The other possibility is that Joan is the final target. The fact that Sherlock went right to Moriarty and was ignored or rejected, rather suggests this second line of thought. But thinking that way just scares her, so she stops. How to escape?

Sherlock would use whatever was around him. Joan scans the van, rummages awkwardly in her pockets. She has lost her purse where there would be tweezers and pins, small scissors. She has nothing in her pockets except tissues. Useless.

There are windows in the back doors of the van, but she cannot reach these. There are a couple of small gaps in the floor, or rather, beside the wheel arches. Not big enough to put your hand through, much less your body. How will Sherlock know where she went?

Moriarty will tell him. If Joan is bait, Moriarty will provide a location for an exchange.

If Joan was the target, if this was just a hit, Joan would be dead already. She takes comfort from this idea.

She feels with her free hand in her pockets again – jeans, cardigan...lip balm. Pale pink petroleum jelly kind.

She can devise no weapon or escape tool based on Vaseline and tissues.

Cold air from the hole in the wheel arch chills her knee.

A tissue could block the draught. Or – a tissue could be stuffed through the hole. A trail of breadcrumbs?

Joan gets out a tissue. How to distinguish it from some other piece of litter? A message. She dabs her finger in the Vaseline. Too clear. It does not stand out. She rubs her index finger over her lips to pick up some colour. Better. She writes JW on the tissue and stuffs it through the hole. It disappears.

It might be immediately stuck in the engine. She has no way of knowing. All the same, she writes her initials on the remaining tissues and dumps them out of the van one at a time. The last one is very faint – her lipstick is gone.

That's it. Most likely her final communication – two letters on a tissue. And not what she would write with endless time and a pen. How would she even begin that letter?

Thank you, she thinks. She would begin with a thank you for all the things she has learned. For all the things she has seen and people she has met. For the new strength she has found in herself, for her new self in total. For friendship and camaraderie in the face of danger. There would be gratitude for the times he saved her life and no accusation for this one time he has not been able to.

There are no regrets. She is glad she has known him, helped him, allowed him to change her life too. She can even smile, thinking of him. He will find Moriarty, and bring her to justice, and Moriarty will not fool him with any charm or bribery. Moriarty's power over him is gone, and doubly so if Joan is killed. Sherlock might not be demonstrative but Joan is as sure of him as if he told her every day how much he cares. It is in his every motion, his every glance and twitch.

He will win, he will ensure Moriarty is punished, he will survive this time without drugs and, she hopes, without regrets. He is a whole man again now, and he can continue his life.

He made Joan who she is now, but she has made him too, and she is proud of that.

Not many people get to rebuild a genius.

Joan takes deep breaths. The van is slowing. Soon Moriarty will be here. Joan is determined not to show fear. She closes her eyes and concentrates on the one thing which always gives her strength, which reminds her that the human mind is capable of almost anything. In her mind's eye she sees him and he her and all is well between them. Things are good.

It is the end.


End file.
